4 ms·

The “open web” withered and died the moment Berners-Lee decided he’d cut some corners for convenience and released a web browser that was read-only. Mosaic too

by hhas01 6y ago

The “open web” withered and died the moment Berners-Lee decided he’d cut some corners for convenience and released a web browser that was read-only. Mosaic took that interpretation and ran with it, and a global information platform that should’ve been as easy for anyone to read and write as opening, editing, and saving a file in MS Word became the plaything of the technocratic elite while the ign’ant plebs looked on none the wiser of how they were robbed. Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. That’s what happens when you create gatekeepers and single points of failure. “Just techie on techie.” Oh bless your heart, child. Once again, it was the techies who created this mess—and were perfectly happy with it too while they were the ones in charge. So until technies accept and acknowledge that they are the root of the whole problem, they’re not going to do a thing to usefully change it. ’Cos right now they’re one gang of children trying (futilely) to grab back a prized toy from another gang of children, to have all for themselves. But as long as someone controls the read and write, the conditions that enable these vast walled gardens to take root and thrive will continue to exist. The only way to change that is by restructuring the platform at a fundamental level so that everyone controls their own read and write, and no-one else can just take that from them. .. Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. And then go sort out the stagnant mess that is Apache et al so that they actually speak HTTP right, and provide that client with the “distributed filesystem” it needs to read and write to. Read-write-publish-share. Simple foundational mechanics, and there’s no reason nor excuse why it shouldn’t all work correctly. (Plus, Firefox desperately needs to differentiate itself from the Chrome/WebKit hegemony if wants to justify why it should continue to exist. Well, there’s a reason—and opportunity—right there.) If geeks can make that bit work correctly then they might have a chance at resetting the balance of powr. It’s not a complete solution: there’s still the problems of document search (currently owned by Google) and name ownership (for he who owns your name owns you, and right now all our names are owned by the quasi-libertarian shakedown artists of DNS registrars and squatters), and others. And then there’s the questions of how do you sell it (and Dog knows most geeks couldn’t sell ice cream to Arabs). But it is the first step in the right direction: putting the control into the hands of the Users. All of them, this time. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/ https://digital-archaeology.org/the-nexus-browser/

azangru 6y ago
> Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. > Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. Notice that "WYSIWYGs for web" existed before the advent of Jacks and Zucks. There was Wordpress, with all its glorious WYSIWYGiness that FB and Twitter lacked, which, according to Wikipedia, was first released in 2003. There was LiveJournal that got released even earlier. And yet, it is Jack and Zuck, not Matt (Mullenweg) or Brad (Fitzpatrick), who somehow caught the zeitgeist and attracted the crowds.
- indymike 6y ago
  This has been done (wysiwyg Mozilla browser). Mozilla used to ship Composer, and then post Firefox there was nvu. Now there is Blue Griffon, which uses Mozilla's rendering engine. What Facebook provides that has so much value is audience that includes lots of people you know.
  - hhas01 6y ago
    Yes, I’m quite aware that Mozilla used to have a crappy HTML editor strapped on as an afterthought. Treating editing as a second-/third-class citizen and not as a first- is exactly what led to this mess in the first place. Again, see Tim Berners-Lee and the first, second, and third web browsers ever released, and notice what changed along the way. If you cannot edit and save a web document as easily as you can read it, the system has already failed. If you have to switch mental or environment modes to do so, the system has already failed. If you have to switch to a different tool to complete the write operation (e.g. FTP client), the system has already failed. If you have to fiddle with individual files instead of discrete documents, the system has already failed. If you have to manage local copies vs remote copies of your documents, the system has already failed. And so on. It doesn’t matter how important something is, if you make it hard (or even just harder) to do, 99% of people will not do it. That’s not on them as the users; it’s on you as the product developers. Making a read-write web work as a mass end-user product means eliminating ALL the user-facing distinctions between web-browsing for reading and web-browsing for writing. Those distinctions are completely contrived and unnecessary—not to mention ultimately harmful—and the only reason it ever existed in the first place is ’cos Tim Berners-Lee was a lazy ass who couldn’t be bothered to port the authoring part of WorldWideWeb to Windows, and in doing so destroyed the very Open Web that he himself invented. Talk about Laws of Unintended Consequences. Like I say, think of MS Word (not an ideal example in terms of ease of use, but it is ubiquitous and an interaction model everyone understands), only instead of reading and writing to file paths reads and writes to URLs. That is the basic UX an open web requires. Anything else is just the geeks playing with themselves (again), which the marketers and money men will make into their own (again). .. I mean, it should not be hard to grasp (I am a BoVLB, so if I can see it…), yet so many dyed-in-the-wool geeks utterly fail to grasp it. Maybe that’s because they’re so inured to the current imbalanced system that they cannot imagine it being any other way? Perhaps because they themselves are a deeply integrated part of that system and, on the inside looking out, cannot see what all the fuss is about when that imbalance already works in their favor. Alas, we do seem to be two cultures separated by a common language here, so help me understand how to explain it in a way y’all can understand.

by hhas01 6y ago

azangru 6y ago

> Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests. > Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate. Notice that "WYSIWYGs for web" existed before the advent of Jacks and Zucks. There was Wordpress, with all its glorious WYSIWYGiness that FB and Twitter lacked, which, according to Wikipedia, was first released in 2003. There was LiveJournal that got released even earlier. And yet, it is Jack and Zuck, not Matt (Mullenweg) or Brad (Fitzpatrick), who somehow caught the zeitgeist and attracted the crowds.

indymike 6y ago
This has been done (wysiwyg Mozilla browser). Mozilla used to ship Composer, and then post Firefox there was nvu. Now there is Blue Griffon, which uses Mozilla's rendering engine. What Facebook provides that has so much value is audience that includes lots of people you know.
- hhas01 6y ago
  Yes, I’m quite aware that Mozilla used to have a crappy HTML editor strapped on as an afterthought. Treating editing as a second-/third-class citizen and not as a first- is exactly what led to this mess in the first place. Again, see Tim Berners-Lee and the first, second, and third web browsers ever released, and notice what changed along the way. If you cannot edit and save a web document as easily as you can read it, the system has already failed. If you have to switch mental or environment modes to do so, the system has already failed. If you have to switch to a different tool to complete the write operation (e.g. FTP client), the system has already failed. If you have to fiddle with individual files instead of discrete documents, the system has already failed. If you have to manage local copies vs remote copies of your documents, the system has already failed. And so on. It doesn’t matter how important something is, if you make it hard (or even just harder) to do, 99% of people will not do it. That’s not on them as the users; it’s on you as the product developers. Making a read-write web work as a mass end-user product means eliminating ALL the user-facing distinctions between web-browsing for reading and web-browsing for writing. Those distinctions are completely contrived and unnecessary—not to mention ultimately harmful—and the only reason it ever existed in the first place is ’cos Tim Berners-Lee was a lazy ass who couldn’t be bothered to port the authoring part of WorldWideWeb to Windows, and in doing so destroyed the very Open Web that he himself invented. Talk about Laws of Unintended Consequences. Like I say, think of MS Word (not an ideal example in terms of ease of use, but it is ubiquitous and an interaction model everyone understands), only instead of reading and writing to file paths reads and writes to URLs. That is the basic UX an open web requires. Anything else is just the geeks playing with themselves (again), which the marketers and money men will make into their own (again). .. I mean, it should not be hard to grasp (I am a BoVLB, so if I can see it…), yet so many dyed-in-the-wool geeks utterly fail to grasp it. Maybe that’s because they’re so inured to the current imbalanced system that they cannot imagine it being any other way? Perhaps because they themselves are a deeply integrated part of that system and, on the inside looking out, cannot see what all the fuss is about when that imbalance already works in their favor. Alas, we do seem to be two cultures separated by a common language here, so help me understand how to explain it in a way y’all can understand.